Objective
In the current competitive market, industrial companies must establish and maintain Total Quality Management Systems (TQM), in order to fulfil important objectives:
- To assure the appropriateness of the products supplied by the organisation.
- To obtain the confidence of the customers (existing and prospects)
- To accomplish Governmental or Administrative rules in their respective markets.
Many European industrial companies have just passed, are passing, or will pass in the near future through an ISO-900x Certification procedure as a first step to implement TQM in their organisations. Frequently, this process is done in a manual basis, by hiring external consultancy services to define and to implement the Quality System. Later, the company must maintain the Quality Management System (QMS), control the quality related documentation, continuously assess the state of the system, allow its users to introduce suggestions or modifications to improve the system functionality and, to control this process, pass successive internal and external audit reviews. These requirements impose significant costs to the companies since normally the QMS is fully based in documents and procedures stored and maintained in a paper format.
In addition to the previous requirements most target organisations are currently exploring Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) technologies and methods, as a way of improving their competitiveness. Unfortunately many BPR projects fail because of the high costs and difficulties of obtaining accurate information about the processes, and in the deployment of the process changes because of organisational resistance.
This project focuses on integrating TQM and BPR objectives, minimising the costs of information capture and implantation through an appropriate synergy by supporting both objectives co-operatively in a common IT system IQAC, and specially test the outputs of the project by assessing pilot implementations in three companies of the Saint Gobain consortium (all of them with similar problems but at different stages of development) by developing a computer-based application which addresses the quality implantation cycle.
The developed application will support the organisation in the following areas:
- Definition of the QMS best suited for an organisation, obtained from its characterisation (Domain description) and the representation of the considered norms and standards. Generation of the Quality Manuals and related documents, and definition of the quality processes.
- Implementation of such Quality Management System. Management of all quality and processes related documents electronically. Integration with the Process & Quality Control applications, and the existing corporate systems. Users training. Compilation and treatment of users' suggestions to improve the QMS.
- Implementation of auditing capabilities to continuously analyse the state of the Quality Management System and verify its compliance to the norms. Integration of BPR tools accessing to the common data. Pilot implementation and assessment.
To solve the stated problems, the consortium will integrate state-of-the-art technologies: Business Domain analysis, declarative programming, work-flow technologies, knowledge based systems and document generation techniques. Although IQAC will be tested with ISO-900x standards (currently the key norm in Vetrotex) it will be developed with the objective of being easily adapted to other quality norms. A 3rd party BPR tool will be integrated, accessing to the common representation of the processes.
The potential market of the developed application is enormous both for the short and long term (implantation and maintenance of the QMS in the organisation), existing at this moment a reduced set of competitors in the market. The commercial possibilities of the project results will be fully exploited by the industrial partners, by jointly marketing a commercial product. For the final user organisations the main benefits will come from the operation improvements and reduction of costs in the introduction and monitoring of Quality Management Systems in the European industries (evaluated in about 6 to 12 % of the total companies' turnover). This will redound in a significant improvement of the competitiveness of such companies by sharing common solutions to similar problems.
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Programme(s)
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Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
E - 28760 Tres Cantos
Spain
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.